I will start by saying this book is a good resource for anyone wanting to know what features are in Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1. The book pretty much covers most areas you would expect in Lotus Notes and is a great overall summary with many examples. I really love the format of the book, it was very easy to follow, very well written, and easy to read. I loved the appendix! The different chapters about add-on products was a great benefit. There were at times I felt like I read some things in one chapter and almost the same thing in another chapter with little value added. I really wish there was more around development techniques and best practices and in general I would have preferred a little more depth in some areas. For instance, there was a lot of material about Composite Applications but most of the information was based on 8.0.x stuff.
There is also a free chapter you can preview: Chapter 8 - which is an extracted Chapter that anyone can check out here, it covers a lot of information and should be quite useful for developers.
Ok, here is my constructive feedback. I will first say that the product documentation is something that needs to be addressed and I can see why many of these areas were not covered, but if you follow the yellowverse you will see the many blogs from IBMer’s, partners, and customers talking about these topics. Since this is an “upgraders guide” it was difficult for me to figure out how hard I should judge on some of the areas. The book clearly hits end user, admins, and developers so I took the liberty to just throw it all out there!
End user and Administrative areas:
Managed Settings - using Domino policies you can push down Eclipse plug-in preferences. They definitely should have mentioned this or walked through the policy screen like they did the Widget policies.
LiveText, Toolbox, and Widgets - arguably one of the most popular areas of the 8.x release and I see a small mention of it in this book. This probably deserves its own chapter considering the new options that were added in 8.5.1. Creating your own recognizers is also a popular topic in the forums.
Serviceability - it would have been nice if the book included a chapter on serviceability. For instance, what the directory structures are, where to find logs, how to look at and evaluate the output from the IBM support assistant. In my experience this stuff is very valuable to companies and admins supporting a rich client.
Developer areas: being a developer myself I would have wanted to get some detailed information about the following areas. It looks like the title of the book was changed from 8.5 to 8.5.1 because the developer chapter only talks about 8.5 and really the content is based on 8.0. So I would update this chapter in a revision to include some of the 8.5.1 enhancements.
XPages - even though this could be an entire book on its own, I think it warranted at least its own chapter. With the introduction to XPages on the client in 8.5.1 this should have been clearly highlighted! You will have to settle for the yellowverse, product documentation and the Designer Wiki.
Eclipse plug-in development - It would have been nice to have a chapter to primer the Eclipse/Java developers - or the want-to-be’s. plugins, Java UI, extensions. On Page 151, the screen shot not the CAE Palette in 8.5.1. It looks like a palette from 8.0 with all of the views in the system loaded into it.
Lotus Symphony - even though Symphony could be its own book. It would have been nice to see integration with Composite Applications or how to extend Symphony with Eclipse and the JUNO API’s.
Lotus Expeditor - it would have been nice if they mentioned how Portal can manage composite applications for role based application support and also explain the value-add over base Eclipse.
Online webinars from Lotus Education
Mon, Mar 15th 2010 2:50p Bob Balfe Read Ed’s post about the up and coming Lotus Education webinars and the agenda’s look great. I saw the XPages and Composite Applications sessions at Lotusphere and I am sure the webinar’s will be more than worth the cost of these sessions. Interestingly, Hunters course outline looks very similar to the labs I am giving at Germany later this week. I think showing how to integrate Java, SWT, XPages and container components into a single application will be some good educa [read] Keywords: domino
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Do you want XPage components in the side bar?
Fri, Mar 12th 2010 8:00a Bob Balfe Looks like I lost two posts when they moved my blog between servers! I am going to post these back here. For this specific one, if you answered prior that you would like this can you please do it again. There was a request for what customers would want such a thing.
One of the biggest wins for Lotus Notes at Lotusphere was the fact that XPages can run in the 8.5.1 client. You can, in that release, also have XPages as components in composite applications. This also means you can have [read] Keywords: lotus
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Lotus Traveler is the killer app for the iPhone
Wed, Mar 10th 2010 6:00p Bob Balfe And its not even an app!
So I have had the iPhone for about 6 months now and I have to say it is an amazing device. Everyone I show the iPhone to is amazed with the different things it can do and the applications it can run. The biggest surprises I get are when I explain, and sometimes show them, how my calendar, email, and contacts all sync with the iPhone and that its not really even software its just another account. I have also updated my Notes contacts many times and it reaches the de [read] Keywords: lotus
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Book Review: Learning Dojo
Wed, Mar 10th 2010 12:10a Bob Balfe Learning Dojo
by Peter Svensson
Review:
I really enjoyed this book. It hit on a lot of topics that kind of surprised me. I starting reading many sections in the book and thought “wow, what a great idea for a technical book”. It could have been something small like the depth of the introduction chapters or something larger like the chapter on AOL and Googls Content Delivery Network (CDN). I guess my point is, this book was an excellent tool and resource to learn Dojo - it cove [read] Keywords: dojo
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Cheaper moving from Exchange to Domino…
Mon, Mar 8th 2010 2:10p Bob Balfe After reading the article Greg posted I saw the comments at the bottom and wanted to pass them on from Karen. I am not sure who Karen is but this is a pretty nice comment about their choice and the comments about Microsofts service consultants.
Article link is here.
from Karen:
I wanted to share that we are in the middle of a migration from Exchange to Lotus Domino. I am amazed of the difference in cost. The Lotus product licenses are so much easier to understand and are significantly cheaper. [read] Keywords: domino
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Messing around with Dojo and reading a new book!
Tue, Feb 23rd 2010 11:30p Bob Balfe After attending Dojo.connect() conference I decided to review a couple of more books for Packt Publishing. The first one I am reviewing is Learning Dojo by Peter Svensson. I am only 6 chapters in and I am finding the book to be extremely helpful. It goes at what I consider a slow and in-depth pace - which is exactly what I look for when I am learning something new. I figured I would start to put some of the stuff to practice so I created a videos section on my balfes.net site. I st [read] Keywords: css
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Google Translate and whether it is really needed?
Fri, Feb 19th 2010 7:11p Bob Balfe So I added Google Translate to my site. Most of my hits are from the United States, many European countries, China, and India. It would be interesting to hear whether or not this is needed on my site. It would be nice if I could figure out whether or not it would be used. Does anyone have any idea how I could track that?
technorati tags: blog, Google, translate [read] Keywords: google
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Why SWT/Qt when you have the Lotus platform?
Thu, Feb 18th 2010 8:30p Bob Balfe I just read this interesting post about a project for an SWT version based on Qt. The project argues it is for styling purposes. What is interesting is the Lotus platform (Lotus Expeditor) which is what Lotus Notes 8.x is based on has had SWidgets since day one. We even tried to get SWidgets put back into the Eclipse platform but with no success. You can play with the Lotus Expeditor platform and the toolkit for free.
If you are not familiar with Lotus Notes or Lotus Expeditor you can [read] Keywords: expeditor
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